Comment by sytelus

This is one thing people don't understand. In my current work I need to regularly design a new algorithm or modify existing ones. I've to keep books like CLRS and TACP always accessible, not for show but actually looking through pseudocode and analysis. I regularly sweep through dozens of research papers to find the state of art. These are not one-off events it's my and my teams day to day life. Lot of people often gets surprised when I tell this to them because most developers think they never need to use any CS stuff they had learned. If they ever need answer on any algo there is always framework or wikipedia. They just don't understand that most real world problems (or at least the ones we work on) require significant amount of customizations and mixing. These same people then insist that just because they have "shipped" some code or because they have showed "coding" capability via github profile, they should be eligible to be hired anywhere. Coding and development is "given" and that's considered as easiest part in our line of work. Shipping things is certainly art but that's hardly sufficient condition. The choice, analysis and design of algorithm makes ALL the difference in type of problems that we work on. If a guy showed up who wrote some package manager on Mac but couldn't work with binary trees, I would probably would pass too because in the kind of work we do his chances of success is fairly low. Frameworks and programming languages can be learned pretty fast but learning CS and building problem solving abilities using CS primitives takes years and years of intensive study.